I'm trying to switch from IDE to AHCI in Windows 7 without having to do a reinstall if possible.

I've followed the numerous instructions out there on how to enable the AHCI drivers with registry edits, then changed the proper BIOS settings but doing this results in an OS boot loop.

My motherboard (GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3) has two SATA Controllers. The one attached to my optical drives can be changed to AHCI no problems and the AHCI controller/driver shows up in control panel. However, whenever I change the SATA controller attached to my HDDs, including the OS drive, I keep getting the boot loop.

Just curious if anyone has seen this problem because apparently from what I have read this registry fix works for almost everyone.

Final note. I did notice that for XP people had to manually update the drivers to force Windows to switch to AHCI before changing the BIOS settings. Was curious if one could do this in Win7 as well. Worried I would bork my install doing this though.

Any advice or direction is greatly appreciated. THanks!

Last edited by hapyman on Sun Jun 03, 2012 5:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Gigabyte has a tendency to use Intel/AMD controllers and their own controllers on their boards. You should have two different colors of SATA ports, one set controlled by the Intel/AMD controller and the other by the Gigabyte controller. You may have your hard drives plugged into the Gigabyte controlled ports, which usually need additional drivers to function with AHCI. The Intel/AMD controllers will usually work with just the built in Windows drivers. Make sure you have this registry setting enabled http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976 and that you are not using the Gigabyte controller.

ChrisDTC wrote: You may have your hard drives plugged into the Gigabyte controlled ports, which usually need additional drivers to function with AHCI. The Intel/AMD controllers will usually work with just the built in Windows drivers.

I think this is what may be going on here. I will have to try swapping the optical drive ports with the HDD ports and see what happens. I thought I hooked them up so that the HDDs were in the gen 3 ports but could be wrong. Will have to open her up to check it out.

Also may have to check my motherboard CD for extra drivers that I may have missed by accident although I thought I did that right after the OS.

Thanks for the info... thought it may have to do with the different controllers.

Thanks for the heads up but as alluded to in my post I have already made all the necessary registry edits to get this to work. When activating in BIOS even after the changes it causes a boot loop. Must be a driver issue with the different SATA controllers. THanks!

Chris you were spot on. I guess I didn't even realize it but my two HDDs were hooked up to the Marvell controller.

For future viewers (that may run into this problem):

First thing I did was find the Marvell RAID/AHCI drivers and reinstall them but still boot loop. According to my motherboard manual these drivers need to be installed during the Win7 installation manually, which of course I didn't do.

So next I switched my OS HDD to the Intel/AMD controller and left my backup storage drive on the Marvell. With both set to AHCI in BIOS it booted up to windows and then Win7 was able to finalize the installation of the Marvell RAID/AHCI drivers so my backup drive is now AHCI too.

Very nice... thanks for the help fellas. Much appreciated! Knew there was something I was leaving out.

I am having this same issue due to a virus recovery process. I have an Intel D975XBX2 motherboard, which has Intel IC7 southbridge and a secondary Marvell 61xxx chipset. I am using the Intel IC7 ports with 4 drives in RAID0 for video/audio data workspace. I have 2 - 500GB drives on the Marvel ports for OS and other data drive, both using the AHCI mode. The Marvell 61xxx BIOS control is basically ON or OFF, and requires the RAID capable drivers.

The deal is I had dual boot with XP for years, but never really used it this way, when I udpated from XP to Win7. The older data drive is actually my older WinXP drive. When recovering from a virus, I had each drive out in a USB box on another machine and did a cleanup on the WinXP older drive, forgetting that the dual boot setup actually has the boot sector on that older drive. No matter, I only want Win7 going forward. I put the Win7 drive on the Intel IC7 ports with them in IDE mode and was able to use the repair console for add a bootmgr onto the Win7 drive. However, I have not been able to get this drive to support the Marvell ports for boot up. I checked the registry and the drivers list and the up to date Marvell drivers are already installed and the start mode is set to 0 in the registry, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Marvell Startup = 0 (which should mean this driver is available at boot time).

But, it still doesn't work. I have this machine currently setup with these two standalone drives on the Intel IC7 in IDE mode. I want to get them back onto the Marvell ports so I can recover my RAID 0 2TB partition and get back to work... Any ideas?